Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute’s website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, state education leaders in Louisiana decided to take over and rebuild the shattered New Orleans public school infrastructure using charter…
An Open Letter to Kentucky Legislators from the Bluegrass Institute: Dear Legislators, Twenty years ago, a group of community leaders met and wondered how they could make the biggest difference in poor children’s lives in the inner city of Louisville. Their passion resulted in School Choice Scholarships and was based on the founders’ vision that children…
A new Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions report released last week questions the lack of research and effectiveness of School Based Decision Making (SBDM) councils put in place over 25 years ago by the Kentucky Education Reform Act. Kentucky Can’t Wait 100+ Years for Our Schools to Improve provides top line data from the report:
As Kentuckians have homage today to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at many events throughout the commonwealth on what would have been the 89th birthday of the civil rights pioneer, it’s important to remember what’s been accomplished as well as that which remains undone and, perhaps most importantly, what’s possible when it…
Editor’s note: The Bluegrass Beacon is a weekly syndicated statewide newspaper column posted on the Bluegrass Institute website after being released to and published by newspapers statewide. “All I want for Christmas is for Republicans to act like Republicans,” I recently wrote on Facebook. Responders aren’t optimistic. “LOL Jim Waters … I’ll bet you still…
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Missouri wrongly used its constitution’s Blaine Amendment to deny a publicly funded grant to a church-run preschool won’t directly affect growing efforts to add Kentucky to the list of states offering private school-choice programs in the form of tuition assistance via tax credits. Tax-credit proposals like ones introduced in…
A relatively new report from the Washington Examiner says that charter schools in Florida now significantly outperform the traditional schools in that state. Just of few of the comments include: On state exams, charter students outperformed their peers in traditional schools in 65 out of 77 comparisons; Charter students learned more from one year to…
David Hornbeck, an architect of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) who describes himself as a “consultant to the Kentucky legislature, 1989-1990,” claims in a recent op-ed opposing charter schools: “Kentucky’s children have made more progress than those of any other state in the nation.” For such a claim to hold up under scrutiny of…
Some defenders of the education status quo contend that the existence of the Kentucky Education Reform Act renders charter schools useless in the Bluegrass State. But staff education analyst Richard Innes challenges the claim, taking issue with KERA architect David Hornbeck’s recent assertions that “Kentucky children have made more progress than any other state in…
The Bevin administration and House Republican leadership – despite hard pushes for other platform priorities such as right-to-work and prevailing-wage repeal – may settle for a mediocre charter-school bill. This is a testament to the stronghold the public-education complex has on our commonwealth and to its willingness to put money and control before students’ best…